Garden Tuesday - 06/09/09

Green Beanies!

Happy Tuesday everyone! The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, the bees are buzzing, and somewhere there is a beasty critter with a tummy full of my strawberries! Oh raving disappointment! My strawberry plants this year are loaded with a magnificent harvest. Imagine me, every day, lovingly looking upon the little heart shaped fruits ... encouraging them to grow and ripen. Then imagine my furrowed brow and downturned face when I went to harvest the fruit only to discover that the magnificent red berries had already been consumed. Right. Off. The. Stem. Not picked, mind you. My children and spouse are innocent. No, some obnoxious beast ate them right off their stems leaving the top of the fruit on the plant. Oh, they didn?t touch the ones that haven?t turned red; nope they ate just the ripe ones. Grrrrrr. I?ve no clue what ate them. Raccoons? Mice? Opossums? Slugs? I don?t know where the blame rests, but you can definitely see ?chew? marks and something out there has red strawberry juice trickling down its chin. Grrrrr, I say, Grrrrr!Baby Lady Bug farming the Curly Leaf Parsley

Anyway, these things happen. I may need to get creative in figuring out how to deter this from repeating. The rest of the garden is doing well. We had a huge thunder and lightning storm blow through last week, and I mean HUGE! Although we do get hail storms in the spring (little pea sized hail), thunder and lightning rare in these parts. There were such severe wind gusts that thousands were without power and there was tons of property damage. Had I not witnessed it myself, I could never have imagined the swirling mass of pollen that filled the air. The air was just clogged with yellow gunk everywhere! I hollered to my kids to close the windows as fast as they could, then they had to rinse off because of all the pollen coating everything. The hospitals were and continue to be inundated by folks suffering from an increase in severe allergies, so much so that the hospital closest to me had to set up a triage tent outside the emergency room to handle the influx of allergy and asthma patients. My son and I both have allergies, and we?ve been pretty miserable for the past few days. Usually the rain helps clear the air, but the pollen is now coating everything do to the wind storm. My garden beds are loaded with all sorts of pollen, and tree buds, and stuff from the storm. On the bright side, I?m seeing more bees this year than last year, so hopefully the garden will benefit from Mother Nature?s show of power.Garbage Can Potatoes

These puppies are doing amazing! The plants now completely fill the can. One thing I did wrong ... I wanted to even out the dirt that I had incrementally added to what I call the potato jungle and so I kind of rocked/shook the can. BIG MISTAKE. Don?t do that! Centrifugal force caused the plants to congregate in the center with the dirt out at the edges. I tried to rearrange them after my error, but it was extremely hard to do. As you can see by the photo, the plants continue to thrive, so I don?t think I hurt anything, but be sure you don?t do what I did!Italian ParsleyFirst Tomato Flower (See how the green leaves are kind of yellow? Hmm.)Little Sweet Pea from last week did make it! I just love how the pea plant leaves unfold right from the very start!Marigolds to add color and bring on the bees!Um, I?m embarrassed to ask this, but how does one harvest this type of lettuce? It?s my first time growing it, and I?m guessing I just snip off the leaves? Anyone care to enlighten this novice gardener?

Still have to construct the vine support for the beans and peas. Plus, I still need to cage my tomatoes. What?s new in your garden?